Industry News

Business rates - Autumn statement 25th November 2016

The chancellor Philip Hammond confirmed that the government will push ahead with its £6.7bn planned changes to business rates. The chancellor said that the maximum increase in rates through transitional relief - the system allowing rates changes to be phased in over a period of up to five years - will be reduced for large business with bills of more than £100,000, from 45% next year to 43%, and from 50% to 32% the year after.

Ian Allison, business rates director at BNP Paribas Real Estate: “The ‘relief’ is indeed complicated, but the chancellor presented this bad news very well, by implying that the level of rates increases that many businesses are set to endure next year will be lower than expected. This is still bad news, albeit not quite as bad as feared.”

Paul Easton, head of business rates at Lambert Smith Hampton: “Whilst business rate payers will welcome this very modest adjustment in the first year, it is hardly significant and more importantly there was no mention in the speech to the penal phasing in of reductions in business rate liabilities following the revaluation.”

Miles Gibson, head of UK research at CBRE: “The chancellor disappointed business rate payers by only marginally cutting the maximum increase in bills next April from 45% to 43%, which businesses will find very difficult to swallow in a weaker trading environment.”

Jerry Schurder, head of business rates, Gerald Eve: “The Chancellor’s flagship £6.7 billion business rates package is in fact no more than a repetition of his predecessor’s proposals, and falls a long way short of the far-reaching reforms businesses have been calling for.”